orginal drawing by Anne Sassoon

Campaigner

24 May 1837 – 11 January 1914

Georgina Weldon a tribute by Emily Midorikawa.

One morning in April 1878, a forty-year-old resident of London’s Bloomsbury, Georgina Weldon, was halfway up a ladder in the library of her house, engaged in the act of dusting books. Though unknown to the general public at the time, Weldon, who lived at Tavistock House – a former residence of Charles Dickens, on Tavistock Square – was a highly recognisable local figure. Eccentricities such as cleaning her own bookshelves, a task more often associated with servants than their mistresses, was just the kind of activity that Weldon would frequently take on if it suited her. She also embraced vegetarianism, cut her hair short and was fond of wearing loose-fitting ‘rational dress’: all things that, to many a convention-bound Victorian, signified behaviour well outside the bounds of normality.

By this stage in her life, Weldon was estranged from her husband, William Henry Weldon, known as Harry, who had moved out of the home they’d once occupied together. But Tavistock House was usually far from empty; it housed a small musical academy made up of impoverished children whom Georgina was schooling for stage careers. A talented singer herself, local residents often saw her ferrying her pupils to concerts in a converted horse-drawn omnibus painted with the words ‘MRS WELDON’S SOCIABLE EVENINGS’. Many who lived in the area considered the vehicle to be ‘horrible’ and ‘insane looking’.

While Weldon was still at work in the library, two unexpected male callers arrived at the house. Having been shown in by the maid, the men told Weldon that they had read about her work in the newspaper, The Spiritualist, and that they were interested in placing some children at her school. Although these men were completely unknown to her, their mentions of both her school and The Spiritualist helped put her at ease. They were, they said, believers, just like her, in people’s ability to communicate with the spirit world. This was not such a rarity. The nineteenth century had seen the emergence of a hugely popular séance scene that counted respected and well-known intellectuals among its enthusiastic participants. Confident that she was among friends, when pressed by the pair about her personal experiences Weldon happily shared details of mysterious things she had witnessed at such gatherings and talked of seeing showers of falling stars. After the men had departed, however, she began to feel unsettled by their conversation.

Weldon’s feelings of distrust would prove correct. The men were not, in fact, Spiritualists at all, but doctors in disguise. They had visited with the sole intention of gathering information on Weldon’s mental state. Despite the widespread acceptance of the Spiritualist movement by many of the day, what she’d told them had quickly convinced these men that she belonged in an asylum. Within hours, a small party of medical staff arrived at the house with a warrant, ready to forcibly take her away.

Miraculously, they were unsuccessful and Weldon managed to escape. Thanks to the sudden intervention of a prominent campaigner against the era’s lunacy laws – which allowed individuals to be removed from society with exactly this degree of ease – plus the efforts of friends who sheltered her in their homes, Weldon continued to evade capture. On coming out of hiding once she felt safe enough to do so, she swiftly had herself assessed by two other doctors who declared her entirely sane.

She would eventually learn that her estranged husband had been behind the attempt to have her locked away – chiefly, it seems, because he wanted to pursue a relationship with another woman. A horrified Weldon swore that she would have her revenge.

Unfortunately, the laws of the time offered little recourse. Although she was given the chance to air her grievances before a sympathetic magistrate, Weldon’s status as a married woman meant that she was unable to pursue further action without the approval of her husband – and, naturally, it was hardly like that Harry would give his approval to legal action against himself.

Despite this setback, Weldon was able to win widespread public support. After her case was reported in Spiritualist publications and the mainstream press of the day, she found herself much in demand both as a musical performer and a public speaker. She sang in the Promenade Concerts at Covent Garden. She gave talks on the unfair nature of the lunacy laws, at famous London venues and also in the more intimate surroundings of Tavistock House. These lectures took place in a theatrical space within the building designed by former owner – and amateur actor – Dickens. Weldon came up with other inventive ways of keeping her story in the news, too, including having a hot-air balloon scatter leaflets about her campaigns along a stretch of the south coast of Britain.

In 1882, she at last found a way to force Harry to face her in court, by suing him for the restitution of her conjugal rights. And later that year, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 removed the long-established legal requirement that a married woman could bring a case to court only with the support of her husband. With this barrier gone, Weldon spent the next few years engaged in a series of civil actions against her husband, the medical professionals and other individuals who had been involved in efforts to have her locked up.

Highly unusually for the era, Weldon represented herself in court – dressed in black, in a draped cap and gown – something that attracted further excited press coverage. The papers called her the ‘Portia of the Law Courts’. By 1887, she was such a household name that she became the face of Pears Soap, her image appearing in their advertisements. Her 1880s heyday had its low points too, though, including stints in prison following successful libel actions brought by a former musical collaborator – but even these did little to tarnish her reputation. On emerging into freedom on one of these occasions, she was greeted by a brass band and a throng of cheering well-wishers waving supportive banners.

Her campaigning during that decade did much to entertain Victorian newspaper readers, but more importantly helped to keep the issue of lunacy reform in the public eye. Eventually, the passing of the Lunacy Act of 1890 brought in the much needed tighter regulations that would have prevented the near catastrophe that engulfed Weldon at her home in Bloomsbury from ever having taken place.     

Emily Midorikawa is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice – a group biography about celebrity Spiritualists of the nineteenth century, Georgina Weldon among them. Emily is also the co-author (with Emma Claire Sweeney) of A Secret Sisterhood, which explores female literary friendships, including those of another famous resident of Tavistock Square, Virginia Woolf. 

emilymidorikawa.com

Read a transcript of the talk Emily gave about Georgina Weldon: An Unlikely Victorian Celebrity on 14 March 2024